Thursday, April 23, 2009

Is Open Source BI Making a Difference?

I’ve spent much of this week at the annual MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA. Feels like a record crowd in both size and energy. Obviously, many questions swirled about the fate of this beloved database and the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

It remains too early for confident speculation with regards to MySQL, even with the Oracle executive analyst call (announcing and discussing the acquisition of Sun) already complete. It was just last year at this Conference that similar questions were being asked about the acquisition of MySQL by Sun. What a difference a year makes.

So, I set my sights on answering a more practical question: is open source BI making a difference? My investigation and observations have yielded a more bullish “yes” than even I expected.

During the course of this week, I met with partners and customers who use both Jaspersoft and MySQL. They told me similar stories about solving new BI problems with our products . . . or solving old problems but in new ways and for new organizations that wouldn’t have had the financial or technical wherewithal to use a costly, complex, aged, proprietary BI product. Commonly, I was told about demonstrated cost savings that accrue to those organizations that are forging forward with open source BI solutions. The average order of savings is 80-90%. Pretty hard to ignore that kind of price/performance improvement in this day and time.

The Oracle acquisition news dominated our RSS readers this week – for good reason. It’s an important industry movement. But, it’s worth pointing folks to some new open source BI contributions that Jaspersoft announced this week.

* Jaspersoft and Infobright have launched a joint project on JasperForge to encourage collaboration and adoption of both company’s community edition product lines. The goal: end-to-end BI and DW that can enable every organization to compete more effectively.

My hat’s off to Sun and the MySQL team and its community for hosting a great event this week. And, my thanks to the Jaspersoft team and community for ensuring we continue to make a big difference in open source BI.